NPR Calls Violent Occupy Protests 'Restrained'

The comforting whisper voices of authority at NPR want to keep their liberal pledge based hermetically sealed from the reality of nationwide May Day riots and chaos caused by the Occupy movement yesterday.

That’s the only conclusion to be drawn from Morning Edition’s scant coverage of what was supposed to be Occupy’s great spring renewal, downplaying if not denying the violence that was evident to anyone paying attention.

Several photographers, including a freelancer on assignment for Metro shooting the Occupy Wall Street May Day events today, were attacked by so-called Black Bloc protesters rallying on the Lower East Side.

Photographer Jeremy Sparig was following protesters as they ran along Forsyth Street after marching across the Williamsburg Bridge. The protesters he was specifically shooting were dressed all in black, with black hoods and goggles covering their faces. This group has taken on the moniker Black Bloc.

“I was in the street, shooting this protester as he ran and he said, ‘Get out of the street,’ or something,” Sparig said.

Sparig told the man he was a journalist trying to record the day’s events, but that’s when the man took a swing at him.

Credit where it’s due — some other Occupy protesters pulled the Black Bloc thug off the reporter in this case, before going back to marching alongside the Black Bloc. NPR didn’t breathe a word of this, however.

More than 100 masked protesters — dressed in black and gray and wielding crowbars and paintball guns — descended on a busy restaurant and retail stretch in the city’s Mission district. Vandals smashed windows, defaced cars and attacked the neighborhood police station.

On Tuesday, a glass crew was parked outside the Mission district police station, and Jeffrey Garcia was inside filing a police report about damage to his two vehicles. His Volkswagen Passat and Chevrolet pickup had been parked on Valencia Street as he had dinner at a nearby restaurant.

In Los Angeles, a group that broke off from a downtown rally for immigration reform briefly skirmished with police and left an officer injured, and 10 union demonstrators were arrested for blocking an intersection near Los Angeles International airport.

In Oakland, police in riot gear fired tear gas and flash-bang grenades to disperse protesters who they said threw objects at officers and struck them with corrugated metal shields during a mid-afternoon altercation.

City officials said marchers had vandalized two banks, a police van and a news vehicle.

To NPR, this is apparently all another “restrained” day at the theater. Nothing here to make you drive your Volvo off the road.